Message in a Bottle

Everyone is familiar with the old 'message in a bottle' story. For those who are not here goes:

Next time you go to a beach or for a boat ride in the sea just take a piece of paper and write some message in it along with the current time/date and some info about you (maybe your email). Put that piece of paper in a glass bottle and cork it up really nicely so that no water is able to enter. Then (you guessed it!) just throw the bottle into the ocean and then check you email from that day on.
You never know when or by whom that bottle will be found. Maybe it will be found few days later by some fishermen or maybe a 100 years after your death it will wash up on some beach halfway across the world.

Such a trick was often used by shipwrecked sailors as a last resort to get some help.

But today I am not going talk about being shipwrecked.
This is about an 'electronic' message in a bottle.

November 16, 1974
Imagine a hot afternoon in Puerto Rico. The impressive Arecibo telescope towering above you. The sun blazing down. Suddenly the dish comes alive with a terrawatt of power (1 trillion watts) for just under three minutes and transmits out a binary coded message, using a concentrated narrow signal beam, to a distant cluster of stars known as M-13 (a famous Globular Cluster in the constellation of Hercules).

This is not the starting sequence of a sci-fi thriller. This really happened and here is the message:


The M-13 is one of the most famous globular clusters in the northern skies. It is about 23,000 light years away (23klc) and contains about 100,000 stars contained in a cluster. The message which was sent about 30 years ago on that November afternoon will take 23,000 years to reach. But in reality the message will never reach the cluster since then due to normal celestial movement the cluster would have moved out of the path of the beam.

This is the 'message in a bottle' sent by humanity to the stars (for aliens?). It contained information about our solar system, our DNA and many other things such as our counting system. The main purpose was to test out the new upgrades made to the telescope and a secondary benefit of course would be to announce the existence of humanity within the infinity of space at the same time leaving something that will surely outlast humanity.
More details here.

Maybe it was an appeal for some advanced (and hopefully peaceful) aliens to come and rescue humanity from itself.


When will we realize that in the scheme of things we are very lonely and very insignificant (both as a race and as a planet)